To understand Yuta Watanabe, you have to know the genesis of the story and the tale of the journey taken, the challenge he accepted.
He was a teenager from half a world away, a young man with a resolve few have, and a kid with an improbable dream when he arrived in the United States chasing his dream less than a decade ago. He knew no one. He could communicate with no one. He wasn’t scared, he was brave.
And he was determined.
“I left Japan when I was 18, at that time I couldn’t speak English at all, I didn’t know anyone,” the Raptors forward said in a telephone interview from New York last week.